Tom Steller: We really want there to be an atmosphere where questions can be freely asked. I learned early in my upbringing that asking questions is the key to understanding. So please feel free to ask questions. You may direct them to any one of the speakers up here, and I’ll try to restate them, or they will, and then we’ll proceed.

Questioner: Dr. Fuller wrote an article to “Christianity Today” about lordship salvation. We’re asking Dr. Fuller to give a brief summary of his response, and then John will give a follow-up on some feedback on some of MacArthur’s works and the reactions of MacArthur.

Dan Fuller: The basic thrust of my article was, would you accept Christ as Lord, understanding him to be a patron provider Lord? A Lord who is working for us. We submit to him as needy clients, and there’s to be no thought at all of submitting to Christ as Lord as though he were the needy client employer, and we were the patron providers meeting God’s needs. Tom Steller, John Piper, and a number of us have the Fellowship of the Arc, we’ve been meeting yearly for about 12 years. We had Dr. MacArthur over at my house and talked to him for three or four hours. And we tried to get him to agree that there are two kinds of lords in our thinking. I go to my doctor and I submit to him as a patron lord. When I’m working as a professor on the Fuller faculty, I am serving them as a needy client Lord, and I am the patron provider, and if I don’t provide them with their needs, I’m in trouble. So John Piper and I, and others, tried so hard to get Dr. MacArthur to agree to this distinction between a patron Lord and a client Lord. Now, it takes a little while to think about that, to have that difference sink in.

As I recall, John MacArthur’s response was, “Well, such terminology isn’t in the Bible. I’d have to use explicit Bible concepts in order to talk about such a thing. I couldn’t come up with some kind of a construction like that because it would be so unbiblical.” And so my memory was, and John can share his memory, that we got absolutely nowhere. I remember you sent a letter to him afterwards summarizing what we had said to try to have one last crack at him, to get him to see that if he would just talk about surrendering to Christ as patron Lord, then he wouldn’t be killing off the assurance of salvation of all 10,000 members in the Grace Community Church by these massively difficult conditions that he was laying down as he was preaching through Matthew. You have to sell all your possessions and you have to hate your father and your mother. You have to deny yourself and take up your cross. If you don’t renounce everything you have, you can’t be my disciple.

I tried to say to him, “If I was ever a member of your church and heard you preach that you would wipe out every bit of assurance I had in about two minutes.” And he has a way of coming back at that which I tried to criticize in the article I sent to “Christianity Today.” And lo and behold, their problem with my article was the same. This client/patron terminology isn’t biblical. So they said, “Thank you, but no thank you.”

John Piper: I have not read Faith Works, so I really am going to have to say things provisionally here because I wrote him, and I wrote a little book review of the gospel according to Jesus in the standards. And he was very appreciative of the review because it was very appreciative of the book. I don’t remember disagreeing with hardly anything in the Gospel According to Jesus. I read it like I was reading a novel. I loved the book. I did not stumble. I have not read Gordon’s critique either, so I’m going to need help on what I’m responding to here. But I’ll tell you the little critique I made of the Gospel According to Jesus at the end of the article. I said, like most Reformed people — he seems to be becoming increasingly reformed, anyway — he insists that obedience, follow and accompany saving faith. And where it doesn’t, the saving faith may not be real. And if that disobedience continues, it is not real. He says that.

What he’s not able to do is explain why saving faith necessarily produces this obedience. What’s the nature of saving faith that makes it impossible that it does not produce it? Now, that’s where Dr. Fuller has been the most helpful to me in recent years, because he’s laboring more than anybody I know — and he beats the puritans on this — to explain the dynamics of the reality of faith in such a way that they necessarily obey. That’s what I’m getting from Unity of the Bible and from long conversations. And that’s what’s missing in the Puritans. I don’t know a lot about the Puritans, but the few I read, Jonathan Edwards and Owen and others, they’re not as clear as to why it is that the faith that justifies also sanctifies. They don’t explain the dynamics of it. Neither does MacArthur in the first book.

So I put that at the end and I waved my little Christian Hedonism flag, because I think that’s the answer, and I said, “Faith is being satisfied with all that God is for you in Christ.” And I can add on “and promises to do for you,” but I like keeping God at the center rather than even his promises. That’s a little difference in nuance between Dr. Fuller and me. It’s not a contradiction, it’s just a little difference in nuance. Because I think the ultimate promise is, “I will be your God, and I will walk among you, and you will be my people, and I’ll be your Father.” The “I” coming through is going to satisfy this cavernous longing, not any other promise he makes about streets, and gold, and friends, and whatever else.

So if faith is being satisfied with all that God is for me in Christ, you can’t commit fornication on that. Because one of the things God is for me in Christ is counselor. And his counsel on sexual relations is to flee fornication. And when he counsels me to flee fornication and offers me himself as an alternative to the way of satisfying my need that way, either I say to him, “I trust your counsel and I’m satisfied with you as my counselor,” or I say, “I don’t trust You as a counselor because I’m not satisfied with that counsel. Thank you. I’ll take Your forgiveness by the way, but I will now go and do what I want.” And that’s the fundamental issue I have with the people that reject “so-called” lordship salvation.

They think you can slice Christ in half. You can take him as a forgiver and say, “I love you, I trust you, and I value your pardon.” But his counsel half — that he’s all wise, and he’s all powerful, he can meet all your needs, he can get you out of any situation, and he’s infinitely smart about what will make your life go best — they say, “No, thank you. I don’t trust you.” I don’t think that person’s saved. I don’t think you can. That’s not trust. That’s just not trust. Nobody in this room would feel trusted if someone said, “I like it when you forgive me, I don’t like it when you share with me your ideas.” Wouldn’t you feel so honored? So I don’t think MacArthur in the first book helped us explain why. He said all the right things about the fact that the effect of faith is this. He just didn’t explain why.

Now, with regard to whether that’s getting sanctification too bound up with justification, let me just drop this on you, and maybe it’ll take us a little bit further. I’ve been thinking about this issue of sanctification by faith and justification by faith, and putting those two phrases beside each other with the word “alone” now, inserted with each one as though they are parallel statements — justification by faith alone and sanctification by faith alone. And then we get four football fundamentals: learn to walk, learn to suffer, learn to profit, learn to profit others. But that’s not contradicting the “alone.” It’s what faith necessarily does.

Now, when you go to justification, you don’t ever do that. What I’m getting at here is there’s not a complete parity between these two statements. The reason, as we were praying in the group with Greg and Larry, we were praying and hit me, I don’t know what you guys are doing, but boom, it hit me. Justification is an act of God that is forensic. It’s a declarative thing, and he just, in his mind, declares views, and reckons me acquitted. Sanctification is not like that. He is the agent, but he’s down here messing up his hands with my life when he’s sanctifying me. Justification is not like that. Justification is an act in the courtroom of heaven. Sanctification is an act in my body, and my mind, and my attitudes. Therefore, when I talk about being sanctified by faith, that dynamic of “by faith” is different than justified by faith, because he’s not down here doing anything in me through that faith in terms of justification. That I think is accounting for a little bit of the uneasiness of whether the “alone” is really alone.

What about reading the Bible, John Owen’s assiduous meditation? Which Dan Fuller does more than anybody in this room probably? Or what about John Owen’s prayer, is that a piece? And you don’t ever talk that way with justification because it’s like that. That has really helped me for getting at some ambiguities of why you would feel constrained, Dr. Fuller, to give us four fundamentals of moving on in sanctification by faith alone rather than just ending your lecture after number one. Just boom, I’ve said it now it’s alone and we don’t need to say anymore. But you felt constrained to say more as Paul does, and the Bible does, and we all do.

How does that relate to your John MacArthur question? I don’t know where Horton is coming from on that issue. I don’t feel that danger in the first book of MacArthur. I think Jesus would have come in for criticism on the same score, and Paul would have too for talking the way he talked. That’s why The Gospel According to Jesus was so strong, because he simply showed, “Look, if you’re going to criticize me for answering the question, ‘How shall I inherit eternal life?’ when I answer it the same way Jesus does, then criticize him, don’t criticize me.”

Questioner: Dr. Fuller, can you contrast your view of sanctification with J.I. Packer and his book on Holiness and J.C. Ryle and the traditional Puritan view. What is the essence of the difference in theory and in practice?

Now, following Edgar’s advice to read only the primary sources, I have spent all my time studying Calvin and Luther. As much as I’d love to study Packer and Owen and Ryle and these people, and I’d profit greatly from them, life is just too short. Would I satisfy you if I talked about my difference on this score with Calvin? Because he’s the person that I know my way around. I don’t know my way around Packer. If it’s not going to work. I can’t handle Packer, and Ryle, and these people, because I haven’t spent time in what Edgar would call reading the secondary people.

Questioner: My problem is that I haven’t had time to read Calvin. Maybe John, would you do it if you can do it?

Piper: Number one is a profound rejection of the covenant of works. I’m persuaded that there is no such thing. Dr. Fuller really didn’t persuade me of that. I just never could find it. I never could find it in the Bible. And Meredith Klein just turned red in the face when he was talking to me like the whole universe was going to collapse if what I said was true, namely the cross would collapse. The fundamental issue on the covenant of works for Meredith Klein and most covenant theologians is that you’re wrecking the atonement. If you say that Adam was not asked to earn eternal life, which then the second Adam purchases by earning it through obedience, passively and actively, then you have destroyed the fabric of the Bible, the atonement, and ethics. So one profound difference for all those three people you named is that Fuller and I reject their structure. That’s a theoretical difference. The structure of the covenant of works is gone.

Now, practically, I’m not sure how this works out because I benefit so much from reading these guys who have this profound difference. I mean, Owen, I was reading him the other night and he said more clearly than any theologian I’ve ever read, “Jesus earned our salvation by fulfilling the covenant of works,” something like that. He just said it very clearly. And I think the practical implication is that running through my system now is not a meritorious effort on the part of Jesus to fulfill the covenant that Adam blew by not earning, but rather Jesus becomes a Christian Hedonist, in that he knows that God is most glorified in him when he is most satisfied in God.

If you buy my definition of faith as being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus, that simply means Jesus glorified his Father through trusting him all the way through the cross for the joy that was set before him. Never did he relate to his Father as an employer with a job description by which he would earn wages called eternal life. God never taught Adam or his Second Adam to do the Galatian heresy. I learned saying it that way from Dr. Fuller. And I think that’s exactly right. He never commended the Galatian heresy as a wise way to live. Rather he commended faith, and faith is seeking to be so satisfied in God that if you have to die in order to get the fullest benefit of God, you’ll die.

If you have to die to bring the redeemed into heaven, you’ll die. If I have to die to carry this church to obedience, I’ll die. But I will not sacrifice the joy of the fullest experience of God in that ministry and in that destiny. And that’s my sanctification. That’s the essence of practical sanctification. If we are holy to the degree that we are cheerful givers rather than begrudging givers, you cannot make people holy without making them happy. And therefore, my goal every Sunday is the advancement and joy of faith (Philippians 1:25). Now, I read parts of Owen that are almost exactly like that. Read the last read pages 82 to 85 of Mortification of Sin. I brought it along here. He talks almost just like that. So I’m wound up saying the Puritans are inconsistent. They don’t carry through the covenant of works thing, or maybe they have a way of making it consistent and I’ve just not seen it. But I don’t find the structure, the theoretical, thing right. So there’s a difference between me and those guys. And practically, I don’t hear them — MacArthur’s just another good example — doing what I said needed to be done, namely calling people to be satisfied in God.

I think most pastors are not as upset as I am when people are satisfied with their money, and satisfied with their second and third houses, and satisfied with their nice clothes, and satisfied with moving to the right neighborhood. They don’t think that’s a big issue. I think it’s the issue. You can’t be a holy person without getting your satisfaction from God. So that’s the best I can do with it.

Questioner: The first night, Dr. Fuller, in a passing comment, you responded to Isaac Watts’s hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and that hymnody was somewhat corrupted by this gratuitous idea that you would serve God out of gratitude, that you would do it out of a loving heart. I don’t want to misrepresent, but you mentioned something about “Love so amazing, so divine, demands, my soul, my life, my all.” I want to question further if I’m understanding you correctly, particularly out of Luke 7 with the story of the woman that sort of interrupts the dinner where Simon the Pharisee is hosting Jesus and she does all of these wonderful things. And in dealing with Simon who is troubled by the way that this woman is serving him — because she’s probably a former prostitute or something — says, “For this reason I say to you her sins, which are many have been forgiven for she loved much, but he who is forgiven little loves little.” The idea that I have preached from that passage and thought that it was teaching is that there’s a direct proportionality between the fervency of my devotion and love and affection for the Lord Jesus and my gratitude to him for the forgiveness that he’s given me. What I think I’m hearing you say leaves me unsure that’s what it says, or that what you’re saying goes with this passage.

Fuller I must make it very clear that having a heart full of thankfulness and gratitude to God is of the utmost importance that the sacrifice of my lips give praise to his name, and how strongly Jesus emphasized our need to be thankful. The one leper that came back and said, “Thanks” for being healed was the only one that stayed healed, and the great sin of people in Romans 1 is their failure to thank God for all of life’s benefits. So don’t misunderstand me. I should be so grateful to God for what he’s done for me that I weep like the woman in Luke 7.

But what I’m complaining about in Isaac Watts’s fourth verse of that hymn is saying that I wish I had a great big gift to give to God, though maybe there’s a way of construing this so that it’s not wrong with. I get nervous because it implies that somehow by giving God a gift I meet his need and that in doing this, I’m returning the favor, and when it comes to my returning the favor in any way corresponded with the favor that God has done to me, it’s absolutely ridiculous. So when it comes to that verse of the hymn, I don’t sing. But I must constantly be giving thanksgiving to God. There are all kinds of Scriptures that come in that, so yes, sanctification by faith alone involves being thankful. In everything, give thanks. So if you understand, I want to be grateful, but I don’t want to give gifts to show my gratitude.

Piper: I think a key to that text is to analyze the psychological dynamics or nature of gratitude. People that say, “Show your gratitude with obedience,” have just not thought as carefully and deeply about what they’re saying so that there might be a way to construe it that is biblical and there might be a way to construe it that’s very unbiblical.

Here’s what I’ve thought. What she’s doing with her tears and her hair on Jesus’s feet is worship. We haven’t gotten to obedience yet outside of, “I love you Jesus, I love you.” Now, if the question is to ask, “All right, there’s this guy that ripped her off that she has to now forgive, and he’s outside, what are the psychological dynamics that should go through her mind as she screws up the courage to do this hard thing?” Now, one theology would say, “Jesus has forgiven her so much and her gratitude should be so great that she now could just extend your forgiveness to him.”

I would simply want to dig in there and say, what’s happened is an essential component of gratitude is delight. When a kid gets black socks for Christmas and you say, “Say thank you to mom,” and he says, “Thank you mom,” that’s not gratitude, because there’s no delight in these black socks. If he had gotten a machine gun or a big water pistol or a red firetruck, when he says “thank you,” there’d be delight in it. Now that delight component is the worship component. That’s what makes worship authentic instead of just “thank you” on a Sunday morning, and that delight is the resting in and being satisfied with this kind of God who gives these kinds of Christmas presents.

If I’ve got this kind of God and can be that satisfied in him and his counsel is to forgive as I’ve been forgiven, then I’m not about to remove myself from the benefits of this kind of relationship by disobeying that kind of counsel. In fact, I’m sure, as Paul said it and Jesus said, it is more blessed to give. I’ll be happier if I go out there. I’ll get more of what Jesus has given me. If I had a gratitude ethics person here, I would say, “Look, I’m not even sure what you mean.” But here’s what I do with gratitude. I just unpack it into its elements and try to ask psychologically and spiritually what’s driving me. If they say, “Well, I don’t want to do that,” I’d say, “Then you might commend works to her.” Because I think I get nervous just like Dr. Fuller does, to say, “Look how much Jesus did for you there. Now you get up and in gratitude you go forgive somebody.” This is not enough. It’s not enough. You’ve got to help her see it is blessed. It’s blessed, the flow of joy and satisfaction coming from this awesome Jesus is going to be more if you go out there where he is and do it. So that’s the way I’ve struggled with that passage. I think we can preach it as is.

Questioner: Since you reject that basic concept of the covenant of works, do you also reject that use of the law which condemns men for their sin and brings them to see their need of a Savior? I think that was Luther’s first use of the law.

Fuller: It’s designated as the first use of the law. The second use is the political use of the law, and the third use is the edificatory use of the law. We agree on that, don’t we? Yes, the law should surely convict me of sin if I understand and make clear to myself and to the people that I’m teaching and preaching to that this law shows me the kind of conduct I would have were my whole hope for the future and my happiness in God himself, and then nice things he does for me like he did for you and me the other morning. If a person understands that the law is the law of faith and that the commands that it gives convict a person then by showing that by violating those commands, you have basically said to God, “I vote no confidence in you.” Now, if the law is regarded as an echo of the covenant of works, the way covenant theology characterizes it, I think the kind of conviction of sin that it gives is a very distorted conviction, if it’s a conviction of all.

Piper: Yeah, absolutely. I do not reject that function of the law, and it’s exactly the same function that Romans 12 has and all the other commands in the gospel context. When you get done reading Romans 12, you should be slaughtered just like reading the Ten Commandments, only worse. Romans 12 is much worse than the Ten Commandments in its convicting power. So there’s no difference between the commands of the Old Covenant and the commands of the New Covenant in terms of their function morally. They damn us. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved” is a damning command. It’s a smell of death unto death if you don’t buy it. It’s just like, “You shall have no other gods before me,” The function of the law, whether it’s in the Sermon on the Mount, or Romans 12, or 1 John, or Deuteronomy 28, damns unbelief when it does not meet with faith. He didn’t meet at Sinai with faith.

The other thing I would say is that just like the New Covenant commandments have the same function as the old, the Old have the same function as the new. Jeremy Taylor said, “God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.” And I wondered if that was biblical for a long time until I found it in Deuteronomy where it says, “Because you did not serve me with gladness of heart, I will give you over to your enemies to serve them” (Deuteronomy 28:47). That means the essence of the law is the demand to be happy in God or to be satisfied in God or to trust God. So it damns us by going far deeper. Here’s another difference, I think, with the paradigm of Puritan thinking and mine, which feels so comfortable at times. The worst sin is the breach of God’s authority in Warfield and others. To sin is to go against God’s authority and his word. I want to go behind that and say what Dr. Foley did the other night. What really makes that such a terrible offense? It’s because a great and glorious and beneficent person is awesomely offended and dishonored when you don’t recognize how great and glorious and beneficent they are.

It’s not just, “God said, do it. If I don’t do it, I sin.” It’s not enough. It’s that paradigm that leaves our churches just sort of hanging in a non-affectional, non-emotional way of command, disobedience, affixing the command in the cross, back to obedience through some mysterious work of the Holy Spirit. And the whole thing of love and joy and passion and relationship can just be left off to the side while things get fixed in all these ways. So the law has that first function by saying you didn’t love the Lord, your God. You didn’t delight in obeying him, which is exactly what the New Testament says. It has a damning function.

Questioner: Wilfried, when you were living in Cameroon, did missionaries from outside Cameroon come to your country to minister and maybe in that way you come to know the Lord?

Wilfred Fon: When I was in Cameroon, missionaries were ministering there. Did I come to know the Lord through a missionary? No. I was led to the Lord by a fellow Cameroonian pastor, and he, I think, came to know the Lord through a school setting.

Questioner: In your memory, Wilfred, is there a missionary that stands out in your mind as having a great impact for good in your life?

Fon: Yeah. There’s not just one. There are a number of them. One is Steve Roy who was pastor here. Apparently Tom did not tell you that we started, we had very good conversations and we had very intense ones, also. We had times in class that he was on fire. Not basically on the fire of the Lord, but on our fire. So we talked a lot, we wept together, we continued to question together, and we grew together. That’s one. The other one is the guy I mentioned when I was talking that I worked with in doing Bible translation and I have orders like Willie Moler. I think he’s retired now, but he came out and taught in Cameroon for a while. Then I have a friend Ken Goldman who is the Baptist General Conference missionary now in Cameroon. He’s here on furlough.

Questioner: What counsel can you give, again from your own experience, regarding what makes for a good missionary?

Fon: I would say a good missionary is one who recites with the Lord. One who can see when a national is making a blunder or one who can question when a national makes an influence. This is an angle that I think missions must take in these days. We do not, at least in my own context in Cameroon, need missionaries to tell us what the Bible says. We need missionaries as colleagues to question when we make inferences of what Scripture says, because they think we can all read. Because that is the point at which I was with Steve. We were able to question each other on the inferences we were making. That’s the point at which I stood with Carl Gravy. We were able to dialogue and question each other as we read Scripture together. And I think when we have those kinds of people ready to work with pastors in any field, you will see lots of changes.

Questioner: Dr. Fuller, what’s on my mind when I’m listening to you is how to communicate this idea of sanctification by faith in the culture that we’re in. I’ve noticed that you have been calling our attention to the way in which the Reformation casts a long shadow over our current culture, and we need to be able to distinguish what’s good out of the Reformation from what’s bad of the Reformation. You’ve been helping us as apprentices to do that by quoting Calvin to us. I’m wondering if we as apprentices now when we go back to our contexts, should also be quoting Calvin and Luther as you have done for us. Is that appropriate in the context? It seems like it might be a difficult thing to do. And if not, how is it that we should try to help translate this and help people to diagnose the culture that they’re in so that they can see these subtle differences and recognize them in their own context? I find this so difficult. I have the advantage of teaching in a classroom where I can test my students at the end of a semester on whether they’re catching onto this. Half the students that I think have it have completely missed it by the time they’ve come to a test. They just seem spring-loaded to bounce right back to where they started. So do we do it the way you’ve been doing it for us or do we need to do it some different way?

Fuller: I think the way it needs to be done is the way certain InterVarsity staff leaders did it. I think you remember Greg Reed and know about the phenomenal ministry he had as an InterVarsity staff leader for 10 or 12 years. There were 50 staff leaders who came out of his ministry alone. And these people that are teaching sanctification by faith alone at InterVarsity, I’ll be teaching two of them tomorrow, the Book of Romans in the Greek and Exodus. You have the whole Southern California team teaching Romans in English.

They say the wonderful thing is that when you teach the gospel to utter pagans at UCLA or USC or Stanford or Berkeley and you teach them sanctification by faith alone, that sin is unbelief, it’s perfectly clear and understandable to them. They haven’t had Calvin’s shadow ever cast on them. They don’t know who he is or what he talks about. Now, of course, if they run up, there have been people who have come under the influence of Greg Reed and his cohorts who have belonged to a Presbyterian USA church near the Stanford campus, and then the Christian Hedonism that underlies sanctification by faith alone. So I would say that with the culture as it is now, most people don’t have Calvin’s shadow. So let’s just go full speed ahead and preach salvation by Galatians 2:20 faith and people will understand us and we don’t need to make fine distinctions. We don’t need to get into all of the theological disputes with Calvin and covenant theology because for most of the people we’re talking to, that’s not relevant for them. Is that an adequate answer?

Questioner: What is the proper role of spiritual disciplines in someone who’s living by sanctification by faith alone? Second, can you talk a little bit more about whether God’s love is conditional or unconditional?

Fuller: Your question regarding the current very popular way of trying to get on faster in sanctification by submitting to Richard Foster’s Disciplines and things like that, I just don’t think that that’s the way to go. I just am not excited about it. You can’t reduce the Christian life to four or five things that you have to practice over and over again, like a baseball player has to maybe hit 10,000 balls in a given year in order to stay up to par for the major leagues, and then three or four other things that a baseball player has to work on doing so that he will be up for major league play. That analogy of Dallas Willard, in my estimation, just doesn’t carry over to the Christian life, because the battle we do with Satan and his scheming wiles is so much more complicated than a baseball game.

It’s like spying, international espionage, counter espionage, double espionage, and triple espionage. So we have to be on our guard all the time. The discipline is to pour all of my energy into letting Jesus satisfy my cavernous cosmic need-love. That’s the discipline I’ve got to carry on moment after moment after moment. If I do that, then I am in a position where Satan finds it much harder to get at me. But to go off in a room and stay silent for 48 hours as Dallas Willard recommends, I just can’t see any point in it. Now, I admit that I probably could get some advantage if I did some fasting. And maybe I should look into the discipline of fasting. There may be some good there that I’m missing, but by and large, I don’t think that the disciplines are the answer to the problem of how to get the church off dead center and get faith doing something for a change.

Questioner: Is God’s love unconditional?

Fuller: Well, my answer is that surely his love in calling out the elect, in choosing who shall be the elect and so on is all done unconditionally, but not arbitrarily. I’ll be glad to unpack that more, but it’s too complicated to do right now. So election is unconditional. But when it comes to the living of the Christian life, I know that if I stop disciplining myself to love the Lord my God in the sense of satisfying my need and start to let this need-love be satisfied by this poultry idol and this tawdry thing here, I know that God’s just going to haul off and really chastise me. I know that if I harden my heart and this goes on for a long enough time to make the God who is slow to anger finally to become fully angry, well it’s the end.

There is no further forgiveness of sins. There is no sacrifice for sins, but only a fearful looking expectation of judgment no matter how hard I seek for repentance, like Esau who sought it with tears and couldn’t find it. So yes, in the living of the Christian life and the actual outworking of these things. God says to one of the kings in the Old Testament, “I will be with you as long as you are with me, but if you draw back from me, I’ll draw back from you.” Is that satisfying?

Questioner: So what about God’s discipline? Is he pleased or is he grieved?

Fuller: Well he loves you and he’s terribly grieved. It’s like a parent when a child disobeys, a parent’s love for the child doesn’t grow less. The parent has to discipline the child but has to take the child off the woodshed. He says, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Of course, the parent analogy doesn’t fit precisely with the analogy of God because there is this warning in Hebrews in other parts of the Bible that there is a point of no return. And at that point, God ceases to love a person and we fall into the hands of an angry God, which is the most fearful and horrible thing to contemplate doing. And Hebrews warn us not to let that happen by letting sin and unbelief go unchecked for very long at all. Stamp out unbelief while this call today (Hebrews 3:12).

Piper: I think the reason I’m upset about the contemporary use of the word unconditional in solving most psychological problems and trying to settle disputes, is that we’re just not making utterly crucial biblical distinctions. I would answer your question, yes, God loves you less when you disobey. The same way if your wife hits you in the face, something profoundly is damaged in your intimacy and you ought to call that love. There is a form of love, a kind of love, that is ruined by disobedience and by alienation. Try John 14:21, which says, “He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father. And I will love him and manifest myself to him. And if you don’t, I won’t.” It’s in the Bible. There’s one answer.

Here’s my main concern. I saw Michael Card in a concert at Church of the Open Door. I went and I’ve never been to a concert like that in my life. He’s a great singer. I like almost all of his songs. But when he started theologizing, this is what he said. We talked about it in the car on the way home. He said, “God loves you all tonight. I want you to feel that. In fact, he loves you so much that he could not love you more than he loves you right now.” I thought that’s getting close to heresy. And then he went so far as to say, “Believer or unbeliever, nothing you are or could do tonight could in any way increase or decrease the love that God has for you tonight.” That’s the end of the Bible. Because what it says is, the covenant love that God has for his bride is no different than what he has for people who burn in hell.

If that’s the only way he loves me right now, I’m done. I’m gone. It’s over. If there is no covenant love by which he overcomes my sin and draws me to himself, that kind of talk, which is just everywhere today, is an absolute denial of New Covenant love. It’s an absolute denial of the sovereign love of God. It puts people in hell and people in heaven all on the same plane. And we all are looked at from a distance by a helpless God who has affections identical for every person. And if we are to experience anything, it is all on us and he has no special affection for his bride. When I preach this on Sunday morning, I just go to Ephesians 5 and I say, “If Christ loved the church on the analogy of the way I’m to love Noël, and I say to Noël, ‘I’ve got no special affection for you. I don’t love you any way differently than I love Shelly or Ruth Fuller,’ she’d be deeply wounded. And I’d be a lousy husband.” And so would God be a lousy God if what Michael Card said of him is true.

It calls into question. I am tempted to say the fundamental structure of covenant theology, but what I mean by that is the way I understand the covenant, namely there is a New Covenant without which I’m a garner. And that New Covenant is that God will cause me to walk in his statutes. God will work in my mind to plant his law within. God will call me out of darkness into light. God will choose me. My answer to your first question is that I think it can be made very simple. Electing love is unconditional, regenerating love is unconditional, and all other loves are conditional. Everything after regeneration that you benefit from is conditional including glorification, salvation, sanctification, and everything else. It’s conditional first upon faith, and second upon the evidence of faith in obedience.

Anybody in my church can understand that. Electing love is unconditional. The act of setting that election upon a given person in regeneration or calling has to be unconditional. What comes out of that is faith and everything in the Bible is promised to that faith from then on, and you shouldn’t call it unconditional. And this talk today about unconditionality is all over. You tell me to love Noël unconditionally. You just have to make some conditions. If she rejects me and won’t give me her body — which she never has, then I pray never will — and she said to me, “I’m not going to give you sex anymore,” and you say to me, “Love her unconditionally,” I would say, “I will love her in that I will stay married to her and I will keep providing for her.” And I will cry over what is gone between us the rest of my life. And that kind of love — intimate, warm, precious, covenant love of affection is gone. It’s conditional. It’s conditional. A successful marriage has to have the fulfillment of conditions in it.

Questioner: I was wondering about the definition of faith and actually the definition of faith and the definition of love. I’m having a hard time seeing how Desiring God would exhaust the biblical use of the word faith. For instance, in Jude 3 where it says, “Earnestly contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” In Corinthians 15, Paul says that the content of the faith is the gospel, the resurrection, the witnesses to the resurrection.” And that if these things were not true, then our faith is vain. There’s a number of aspects to faith that seem maybe not a denial of desiring God, but to go beyond it.

Fuller: My answer to those two uses of the word faith in the New Testament is that faith in those passages is being used to represent a body of doctrine and it has a different meaning from faith talking about a response, a volitional response on my part towards God.

Questioner: So then, would it sort of boil down to the definite article, the faith is the content of belief including the resurrect objective faith depending on the context, often the subjective faith would be the expression of our faith to God. Is that what you’re saying?

Fuller: I’m sure the article on faith in Kittel’s dictionary of the New Testament would be helpful. And I’ve seen many articles where the Jude 3 use of “faith” is explicitly cited as an instance of a usage of that word to represent something very different from the volitional response toward God. Now you have to be careful about saying that these changes of meanings in words are signaled by whether there’s a definite article or not. Adler will say that authors use the same word and intend to give different meanings to the same word, three or four or five meanings, and you just have to pick it up from the immediate context. You can’t look for some kind of a little grammatical symbol that will signal meaning changes here. So it doesn’t depend on the definite article.

Piper: I accept your question as a helpful qualification. When I define faith as being satisfied with all that God is for you in Jesus, I realize what I’m really giving is not an adequate definition of every usage of the word faith in the New Testament. I accept that and it’s bigger than that. What I would say in response is that I’m giving what I think to be an essential — and that’s the key word — non-negotiable component of saving, justifying faith. And it implies when I say all that God is for you, that’s a knowledge component there. You learn about that in revelation, which the Bible sometimes calls “the faith.” And there are probably a few other usages as well besides those two that may be a little different and broader. So, that’s a helpful clarification

Questioner: Wilfred, you mentioned the two ways that the truth of the Bible interacts with cultural settings either by critique and transformation or accommodation. And there’s some concern that maybe we’ve been accommodating. There are some brave voices that are being raised about that, but they’re normally kind of cast off as a bunch of grumpy intellectuals. I’m wondering if you would just reflect a little bit from someone looking at us with a new set of eyes as it were. How do you see us in the more conservative church with respect to our culture? Do we seem to be accommodated to an extent that we are in danger as some of us might think? Or do you see some healthy critiquing going on? How do you look at it from a different setting?

Fon: I think there is a mixture here. When I was answering a question here, I looked up to John, he was sitting there, and I said, “Science maybe.” In a context like science, somebody may say, “I am a scientist and I am a Christian. And I try to apply my Christian principles in my doing of science.” And the question is how do you do that? And he might say, “I am honest and I try to follow my method through the end. I bring my Christian honesty and my Christian fairness to science.” That is an evangelical American perspective of how Christianity is related to science. And that is a problem for me because I do not just do science and then bring my Christian ethic alongside it. But science, to me, is what it is because it is religious and that is difficult for people to understand.

The question then becomes, is there a Christian way of doing science? I would say yes. You can even either do it as an unbeliever or as a believer. I use the quick illustration that when I go grocery shopping, it is a religious art to me. If American evangelicalism cannot see grocery shopping in that light, then there is a problem of relating Christianity and the Scriptures to life, which I think in my own crude way, is saying that sanctification is by faith alone. If you can separate some part of your life from sanctification, then you run into a problem.

Piper: Can I just follow up on that a minute? I didn’t mean to... but this is really important. This is really important. So what does the evangelical church need? I mean, that’s what you’re usually asking about. These people that come to sit in these pews. They need to somehow be taught to shop differently, buy clothes differently, right? If what you just said is true that there is an ungodly way to shop for groceries, we have to preach that. I mean, if 90 percent of their life, which is that kind of stuff, is being lived godlessly, we shepherds should care about that, I think. So what do we need to do?

Fon: We evangelical emphasize on tithing and giving a tenth to God. And when you give the tenth, what happens to the 90? That is the problem I have in my hands as I look at American life. If I tithe, what happens to my 90 percent? If I tithe a 10th of my time, if I give it to the Lord, what happens to the 90 percent? What happens to the 90 percent of my salary? I think the question I’m raising there is that, 100 percent is in relation to God. It is not 10 percent to God and then 90 percent to shopping. Should we then shop as Christians? I would say yes. How is that shopping supposed to be done? How different is it supposed to be from my next-door neighbor who is not a Christian, when he gets down and he is an economist and he is able to make ends meet with his income, and I go down there and I am able to make ends meet with my own income? How different are the two? In order to answer that question for me, I need to break back from that surface question that receives an economic analysis to a question that, for me, receives a theological analysis. From what perspective do I come to that life? Do I come to it to do it for myself as an autonomous human being or do I consider the value, the life of God that he has given me in Christ Jesus, to live it and express it in this world? I think that’s the key for me.

Piper: I would love to talk about that for a long time. My plea for you pastors would be that you wouldn’t just say to do all for the glory of God. I grew up hearing 1 Corinthians 10:31, but nobody ever preached a sermon on how you shop for groceries to the glory of God, nobody. There was not one sermon on the how. And so it won’t do good for us to walk out of here and say, “Everything relates to God, do all to the glory of God.” We’ve got to ask, “How do you shop by faith alone? How do you shop by faith alone?”

Questioner: I’m looking in Romans 8 where it talks about how those whom he predestined he called, and those whom he called he justified, and those whom he justified he glorified. Unless I misunderstood you, you said the predestining, calling, and justifying would be by unconditional love and then the glorifying is by conditional love? But then he goes on in the text, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Which love is that and how can you distinguish in that verse saying the first three are unconditional and the last is conditional?

Piper: It’s because Romans 8:17 says if we suffer with him, we will be glorified with him. It never says that about any calling or any election or any predestination.

Questioner: Dr. Fuller, you used the baseball analogy and said, “You can’t just practice batting 10,000 times and doing these things.” And yet yesterday, you used a football analogy and talked about the four fundamentals and equated them to blocking and tackling. I’m wondering how you came to your four fundamentals and why are these the four fundamentals? And how are they different from Willard’s in practice?

Fuller: Well I think they’re different, I have to stop and think for a bit to describe just how different they are. Each of those basics has a lot to be said about them. I only barely scratched the surface. I’m thinking about training, as I said last night, to give to people that would go and become pastors in unreached people groups. It’s vastly more complicated than locking myself away in a room and being silent for 48 hours. I guess that’s one great difference.

I hate to say this in front of Dr. Piper but after the Navy/Notre Dame game is over and the sports announcer was saying, “Lou Holtz says, ‘In preparation for Florida State two weeks hence, we’re going back to the fundamentals’.” And I think at that moment I was led by the spirit to say, “Now you go to that pastor’s conference there in Minneapolis and why don’t you work out four fundamentals that people should keep working on in order to keep themselves up to par, to keep themselves in full trim, in order to carry on the Christian life?” But practicing these fundamentals was into all kinds of things like shopping in supermarkets and time management, and doing a certain amount of isometrics each day and a certain amount of aerobics, and watching the kind of food I eat and getting enough sleep and on and on. And there is a complexity here whereas the disciplines are simple.

They are not canonical. I cannot give you a passage of Scripture to show you that these are the four. It’s just my effort to try to find out some way. It’s just like preparing a sermon, you get three points. And I’m trying to figure out a way to get the obedience of faith taught to all the 11,000 people groups and so I’m putting it down in four points.

Now maybe as I go on rewriting this thing and hoping to get some publisher interested in publishing it, they may change. And talking with some of you, and you may change me, they’re not set in concrete. They’re my first stab at this thing but I think for pastoral theology reasons, for missiological reasons, for getting-the-job-done reasons, we need to have something like four things we emphasize with a lay person. We’re going to work you over on these four things. And when we feel that you are learning, really, to understand these four disciplines, then we’re going to put you on the first-string team, as it were, of Notre Dame.

Questioner: How does John Owen address the topic of spiritual warfare in his works, if he does?

Piper: I just can’t remember. I’ve only read three of his full works and then bits of others and I can’t remember right. You’re talking about Ephesians 6 where Paul says, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.” I know he takes the devil very seriously because I read that section on Hebrews 2:14, but I can’t help you. There is a huge index in the back of the 16th volume. So you could look up text and you could look up topics like that to answer the questions at a library, but I’m not equipped to answer.

Steller: Some of us heard you Dr. Fuller and we’re not sure that we heard you right, but it was troubling, where you made the statement that a truly regenerate person can become unregenerate. Do you want to add to that?

Fuller: In Hebrews 6:4–6 it talks about people who are partakers of the Holy Spirit, who tasted the power of the age to come. I just find it awfully hard to say that these people are almost regenerated but not really. When I see that Greek word, metochous, and see how it’s used in other connections, I find it awfully hard to say that these people who crucified Christ and put him to an open shame when they were partakers of the Holy Spirit at an earlier time aren’t regarded by the writer of Hebrews as regenerated. Now I could be dead wrong, but that’s the way I find it necessary to speak today.

Piper: The word regenerated doesn’t occur in Hebrews, I believe. Isn’t that correct, the concept of new birth is not in Hebrews?

Fuller: That’s true.

Piper: So what are you really saying, then?

Fuller: Being partakers of the Holy Spirit, I thought, was something only regenerated people could enjoy.

Piper: I have two responses. One, the reason I don’t think the writer to the Hebrews views the person there as — I’m not sure what word to use for his writing — perfected, justified? He doesn’t operate with the concept of new birth. And you’re using it in a way differently than you’re going to use it in a minute when I ask you to defend the P of TULIP, because you believe it. So in defending the P of TULIP, when you defend it you’re going to describe the people on which God does the preserving work of perseverance in some other way than the people of Hebrew 6, you’re going to give them another name or something, aren’t you?

Fuller: I would just note that John Calvin talks very freely about the fact of how many people there are who are born again whom God then hardens and they become reprobate.

Piper: Calvin says that?

Fuller: Oh, yes.

Piper: Then you and he are together in a great error, which is really unusual.

Fuller: I can get the exact quote up.

Piper: Well you fish for it while I’m giving the biblical.

Fuller: Well, you’re talking about TULIP, which is not biblical.

Piper: Oh, it’s biblical. It is very important that from Hebrews not just from Paul, you can answer your understanding of Hebrews 6:4–6. Hebrews 3:14 speaks about this and the RSV blows it, but if you watch the Greek it says:

For we have shared in Christ, if only we hold our first confidence firm to the end.

Now those tenses are all important. What that’s saying is the writer to the Hebrews believed that the evidence of whether you ever came to share in Christ is perseverance. Hebrews 3:14 answers Hebrews 6:4–6 for me. And then, when it says “tasted the powers of the age to come,” all I do is go to Matthew 7 and say, “Many of you will say to me, ‘Did we not cast out demons in your name?’” They tasted the powers of the age to come. You can cast out a demon by virtue of the powers of the age to come and be lost, be unregenerate. I don’t have nearly the problem you do describing those people as unregenerate. In fact, it’s Calvin who says the Holy Spirit does a powerful moral renovation in people’s lives without regenerating them, if that’s the quote you’re thinking about. You gave me that quote years ago.

Fuller: Institutes on page 974 says:

The other kind of call besides the general call is special, which God deems to give to believers alone, while by the inward illumination of the Spirit he causes the preached word to dwell in their hearts. Yet sometimes he also causes those of whom he illumines only for a time to partake of it. Then he justly forsakes them on account of their ungratefulness and strikes them with an even greater blindness.

Piper: Well I’m not sure what he means by, “Partake of it,” anymore than most people are sure what Hebrews means. But if he means partake of the effectual call he’s contradicting himself. It’s not effectual then. But those who are called are justified and those who are justified are glorified, nobody drops out in that chain. And so if there is a call that the unregenerate received, it’s a different call. Theology is simply the business of making distinctions, that’s all it is. You have to distinguish different kinds of love. You have to distinguish different kinds of gratitude. You have to distinguish different kinds of faith. Theology is just the business of making distinctions so the Bible hangs together.

And so if there is a call in which the unregenerate participate, theologians create words, effectual and general. And maybe there needs to be a third one, and maybe there does. Because I was talking with Gil Zinke, what about Saul? God gave him another heart. That’s what it says. He became another man, and then he made shipwreck of his other man. Well, what is that category of being that he was? I suppose an Arminian wouldn’t have any trouble saying he was born again and then he lost it, he lost his born-again-ess. He had eternal life and then it stopped being eternal.

Fuller: Eternal is only a quality, I don’t think that’s true.

Piper: Well, we’ve got to stop, but just because lunch is nine minutes ago. The endless day goes on. Thank you so much for coming, I really appreciate your being here. As you travel home I pray the Lord will fill you with joy and peace in believing the precious promises of the Lord, and that He’ll satisfy your heart with Himself and that all the ambiguity that we have in our lives will not contaminate your joy.